The Trump administration is making another bold statement to women: your lives don’t matter to us. At least not if you’re brown and weren’t born in the United States. After ending legal assistance programs for immigrants in detention centers and deciding to keep pregnant women in detention rather than releasing them, as had been the practice, the Trump administration has a new move against women trying to enter the U.S. as refugees. Attorney General Jeff Sessions doesn't think domestic violence should matter in asylum cases, and he’s ready to use his authority to put a stop to it:
Since the immigration courts are part of the Justice Department rather than the independent federal judiciary, the attorney general has the authority to reach in and pick out cases he will decide on his own. If upheld on appeal, the attorney general’s decisions become binding precedents for the immigration courts. [...]
One case Sessions assigned to himself is a decision in 2016 by the immigration appeals court concerning a woman from El Salvador who was psychologically demeaned and sexually attacked by her husband, even after she divorced him. She presented statements from neighbors and a protective order from El Salvador. The appeals court, reversing a lower immigration judge, found she should be granted asylum.
Sessions said he would use the case to resolve a fundamental question: whether “being a victim of private criminal activity,” such as domestic violence, could ever fit the legal requirements for asylum.
Gee, does it sound like he might already have his mind made up that no amount of terror, injury and threat to life inflicted on women by the men in their lives is a reason for them to be welcomed safely and legally in the United States?
This is the administration of contempt for life.